The Redlands City Council in a split 3-to-2 vote on June 24 conferred $1.2 million on a former evidence technician in the police department who had engaged in a sexual relationship with the department’s former deputy chief of police in what is alleged by some and denied by others to have been an effort to advance to a position as a sworn peace office. That action, and the further revelations about the sexual entanglements between members of the department’s male commanders and some of its lower-ranking female officers or support personnel has provoked characterizations of the department as a 21st Century Peyton Place.
A solid cross section of Redlands residents and taxpayers have noted that this was not the first, second or even third lawsuit settlement touching on issues relating to the command echelon’s sexual manhandling of women working for the department and that at least two further such lawsuits are now pending. Meanwhile, the primary perpetrator of the sexual harassment at the center of those claims continues to draw his $178,959.50 per year pension after he exited from the department some two years ago when knowledge about and attention to what he was engaged in made its way outside the confines of the department.
This lack of accountability has sparked calls for reform, amid accusations that Redlands police officers are cynically manipulating the public trust that has been place in them. Three of the department’s former chief, who once commanded the esteem and respect of other law enforcement professionals statewide and nationally, have seen their reputations sustain substantial damage as a consequence of the public airing of the secrets that were suppressed while they headed the department.
After a short stint as an identification technician trainee in 2015, Julie Alvarado-Salcido late that year was hired into the $37,335-salary position of community service officer with the Redlands Police Department, which provided her with 4,870 in perks, $6,459 in benefits and some minimal overtime pay, for $48,760 in total annual compensation.
According to Alvarado-Salcido’s lawsuit, filed on her behalf by attorneys Critel Cabrera and Griselda Rodriguez, two weeks after she began as a trainee, Alvarado-Salcido began what has been termed a “quid pro quo” sexual relationship with Reiss, at that time a lieutenant, in which there was an expectation that she would advance with the department. Early in their acquaintance, according to the lawsuit, she acceded to his request that they go together to the bar at the Doubletree Hotel in San Bernardino. After a few rounds of drinks, she went with him out into the parking lot where she performed fellatio on him in the backseat of his car.
Her accommodation of Reiss had the desired result, and by January 2016, Alvarado-Salcido landed the community service officer position.
The lawsuit provides a further description of an encounter between Reiss and Alvarado Salcido, again in Reiss’s car when she orally copulated him as they were driving to a specials weapons and tactics training exercise in Menifee.
At some point in 2018, a catfight began brewing between Alvarado-Salcido and Geneva Holzer, who had served as a police cadet with the Upland Police Department from 2013 until 2017 and in 2018 was hired by the Redlands Police Department as a forensic specialist. Both Alvarado-Salcido and Holzer had become for several of the department’s officers to include Reiss, in the words of one department insider, competing objects of ravenous intent. Alvarado-Salcido would claim that Holzer was performing inadequately in her role as a forensic technician and was able to get by only on the basis of her looks. Holzer’s perception, conversely, was that Alvarado-Salcido’s advancement within the department to the position of property and evidence technician which saw her salary boosted to $47,261.89 her perks enhanced to $9,198.85 and benefits upped to $10,857.88 to bring her to $67,318.62 in total annual compensation was a result of her breast size and willingness to treat Reiss to her voluptuousness.
Reiss, having notched Alvarado-Salcido as a conquest, by late 2018 was in pursuit of Holzer as an addition to his body count. Holzer, by that point well aware of Reiss’s status as the department as a wolf and the unsavory reputation Alvarado-Salcido had for assuming a prone or kneeling position to advance her employment status, consistently refused Reiss’s advances. Notably, the drama involving Reiss, Alvarado-Salcido and Holzer was virtually universally known among the department’s personnel, who were bemused by the circumstance and curious as to whether, or how long it was to be, before Holzer replaced Alvarado-Salcido as Reiss’s squeeze. Accounts of tart exchanges between Alvarado-Salcido were openly talked about in the department. Given that Reiss had been considered one of the department’s commanders since 2014, no one – including then-Police Chief Mark Garcia, who retired at the end of January 2018, his successor, Chris Catren or Travis Martinez, who stepped into the assistant police chief role, was willing to directly confront Reiss about his intraorganizational womanizing. In 2019, well after his entanglement with several of the woman working for the department was well known, Catren promoted him to deputy police chief.
In Alvarado-Salcido’s lawsuit, Cabrera and Rodriguez concede that in August 2019, Alvarado-Salcido performed oral sex on Reiss in Salcido’s office in the basement of police department headquarters. That proved a key event in the exposure of the sex scandal in the department.
Holzer, having learned of what had occurred, took possession of the chair at Alvarado-Salcido’s work station that was stained with Reiss’s semen, recognizing it to be evidence of a crime. Ill-advisedly, it turned out, Holzer went to her superior, Sergeant Kyle Alexander, with the chair, explaining her belief, based on her experience as a forensic technician employed in a law enforcement setting, that it constituted evidence of a specific crime. Alexander, who was answerable to Reiss up the chain of command, the next day told her to dispose of the evidence altogether, meaning to get rid of the chair. When she did not immediately act to carry out Alexander’s instructions, according to a lawsuit that Holzer has filed against the department and the City of Redlands, Alexander directed her to cut the upholstery on the chair that contained the semen, dispose of the chair, write a report of the matter in which she was to “not be descriptive” of the circumstance involving Reiss and Alvarado-Salcido and provide the report and any photos of the chair to him, and him only, by email.
One of the few areas of agreement that has emerged as a consequence of the multitude of claims and litigation involving the department is that some of the departments female officers and female support personnel routinely engaged in sexual relations with high ranking officers in exchange for advancement, promotions or job status/salary increases.
Faced with this reality, lawyers for the City of Redlands, advised the city council that it should simply throw in the towel and settle the lawsuit brought against it by Alvarado-Salcido.
On June 24, 2025, the Redlands City Council voted 3-to-2, with Mayor Mario Saucedo and councilmen Eddie Tejeda and Paul Barich prevailing and Councilman Marc Shaw and Councilwoman Denise Davis dissenting, to settle Alvarado-Salcido’s suit against the department and the city for $1.2 million.
The city has previously settled lawsuits growing out of the police department sex scandal for $2.5 million, bringing the total payouts relating to the matter to $3.7 million so far, with two further lawsuits pending.
Prior to Alvarado-Salcido taking the department to task, Leslie Martinez, a detective specializing in crimes against children, and Laurel Falconieri, an officer who had been pushed out of the department, had sued the department and the city, alleging they had been subjected to a work environment patently hostile toward woman in which there was “pervasive sexual favoritism” toward men. In their jointly filed suit in which they were represented by Riverside-based attorneys Daniel Moussatche and Dennis Wagner, both Martinez and Falconieri cited in the main the comportment of Officer Eddie Herrera, who had sexually harassed them. Herrera is a Reiss protege.
According to both Martinez and Falconieri, Herrera made false claims against them, including accusing Martinez of making a false arrest and accusing Falconieri of giving a baggie of drugs back to a woman during a domestic violence call, The accusation against Falconieri resulted in her termination.
According to Falconieri, at certain points, including while she was pregnant, Reiss made improper advances toward her, remarking how attractive she was and repeatedly asking her out for drinks, inviting her to his beach house in Carlsbad and sending her photos of himself in which he was unclothed, despite her being married. She had politely declined Reiss’s offers, according to the lawsuit, but Reiss made a habit of remaining physically close to Falconieri, according to the suit, to the point that “Other officers noticed this behavior and assumed that Plaintiff Falconieri was sexually involved with him. Plaintiff Falconieri’s colleagues believed that Lt. Reiss was “in her pocket” and would fast track Plaintiff Falconieri’s advancement due to a sexual relationship that did not exist. Plaintiff Falconieri took no part in fostering this misbelief.”
According to the suit, at one time the Redlands Police Department had provided “female officers with opportunities” but things had shifted and “The Redlands Police Department started to become an environment where female officers would receive promotions and opportunities if they had a superior officer ‘in their pocket,’ which was code for having a sexual relationship with a superior officer.”
According to the suit, when Falconieri and Leslie Martinez came forward with their complaints relating to their treatment and the sexual harassment they had endured, the rest of the department closed ranks around the offenders and the two women were subjected to harassment by other officers. There was no substance whatsoever to Herrera’s accusations that Falconieri had mishandled drug contraband or that Martinez had falsely arrested a subject, according to Moussatche and Dennis Wagner, which was rather a ploy to divert attention from the gross sexual misconduct ongoing in the department.
Catren, according to the suit, was aware that Martinez had filed a complaint against Herrera on July 6, 2016 alleging sexual harassment and a hostile work environment and that an internal affairs investigation had sustained the accusations in the complaint. Despite assurances that Herrera would be disciplined, that did not come about and Herrera was never held accountable, according to the lawsuit. Catren buried that internal investigation report as he did with other reports pertaining to the harassment Falconieri had been subjected to by Herrera and Reiss, as well as Alvarado-Salcido’s sexual involvement with Reiss and Holzer’s gathering of evidence establishing that Reiss and Alvarado-Salcido had engaged in a sexual act at department headquarters, along with Sergeant Alexander acting to have that evidence destroyed, the Sentinel is informed by sources within the department.
Travis Martinez, who is no blood relation to Leslie Martinez, was promoted to assistant police chief in February 2018, at the same time that Catren acceded to the police chief post. Like the rest of the department’s command echelon, Travis Martinez overlooked the accusations that their high-ranking colleagues, in particular Reiss, was engaging in sexual harassment of many of the department’s female officers or support personnel and was engaging in what was apparently consensual relations with other department personnel, in flagrant violation of the department’s ethical guidelines and its and non-fraternization rules.
In December 2022, Alvarado-Salcido’s suit was served upon the city. According to Travis Martinez, the city did not inform him about the suit, and instead filed a claim to dismiss it. It is unclear whether Alvarado-Salcido’s claim against the city, which had to be lodged with the city and rejected prior to the filing of a lawsuit, had also been withheld from the department, although presumably, Catren, and possibly Travis Martinez as the department’s assistant police chief, would have been consulted about such a claim. It was not until January 26, 2023, according to Travis Martinez, that he was shown, by Sergeant Patrick Leivas, a copy of Alvarado-Salcido’s lawsuit. Leivas also conveyed to him, Travis Martinez stated, certain “sensitive information” related to the circumstances pertaining to the suit. Leivas told Travis Martinez that he had previously provided the same information to Redlands City Councilman Paul Barich.
When he spoke with Catren about the information he had gleaned from his conversation with Leivas about the Alvarado-Salcido/Reiss matter, Travis Martinez maintains, Catren feigned being, or was actually, “astonished.” Travis Martinez is somewhat equivocal with regard to Catren’s knowledge with regard to the sexual harassment issues in the depart, stating at one point that it appears City Manager Charles Duggan withheld Avarado-Salcido’s lawsuit from Catren. Nevertheless, sexual harassment issues were at the basis of the lawsuit filed by Falconieri and Leslie Martinez, and Catren was fully aware of that suit and the matters it dealt with. In May 2023, the city and both Falconieri and Leslie Martinez came to an understanding with regard to the allegations contained in their lawsuit and in June 2023 the city announced it had settled that suit for $1.7 million, with Falconieri receiving $1.15 million of that amount and the remaining $550,000 going to Leslie Martinez.
In February 2023, when reports about Alexander’s instructions to Holzer to destroy the evidence of Reiss being blown by Alvarado-Salcido while he was seated in her desk in the police headquarters basement were making the rounds within the Redlands community followed by local press reports, Reiss was put on administrative leave with pay. As those reports became more general in Southern California, then switched from print to television media and shortly thereafter went national, Reiss in late February 2023 applied to retire, and on March 4, 2023, officially left the department and began pulling what was then an annual $178,959.50 pension.
By March 2023, media around the world focused, however briefly, on the lurid and sensational nature of Holzer’s thwarted attempt to get the police department to take stock of the evidence implicating Reiss in imposing himself sexually on one of the department’s 28 civilian employees and the harassment that was endured by some or all of the department’s six sworn female officers. Incidental to that was how Catren had indulged his “men” in such behavior and action while preventing any details about what had occurred from being disclosed. Abruptly, unwilling to field questions coming in from all four corners of the globe, Catren two days prior to Reiss making his exit, abruptly resigned. He had the department’s official spokesman, Carl Baker, publicly attribute his decision to “retire” to a lingering back injury.
Meanwhile, Travis Martinez, who was aware for years, like virtually everyone else in the department, about what had been going on between certain male higher-ups in the department and certain female lower-downs in the department, recognizing that the department’s internal affairs division had not taken up the issue of Reiss’s sexual exploitation of Alvarado-Salcido, made a beeline to the Riverside FBI office, where he provided the information and evidence relating to that matter which had been given to him by the sergeant to the FBI’s public corruption unit.
Though by rank and years of experience with the department, not to mention the consideration that he has familial ties to past high-ranking elected Redlands city officials, Travis Martinez was the logical choice for promotion to police chief. It was nevertheless City Manager Charles Duggan’s perception, and the majority of the city council concurred, that the “good ol’ boys” network at the department that had been in existence for decades was at the root of the problems that were of a sudden manifesting so publicly. A decision was made to go to a level below that of deputy chief to make the interim police chief appointment and Rachel Tolber, who at that point was one of the department’s commanders – a position below that of either deputy chief – was selected, assuming that post on March 1, 2023.
One day shy of three months later, on May 31, 2023 the city council voted to permanentize Tolber in the role of police chief and her installation into that position was officially made on June 12, 2023, a clear sign that Travis Martinez was being passed over. The following month, Travis Martinez, having retained Moussatche and Dennis Wagner, filed a claim against the city. Martinez, according to the claim, had never truly been part of the culture or ethos that had predominated in the Redlands Police Department and in which the likes of Reiss had flourished. In fact, Travis Martinez claimed, he had stood as a bulwark, albeit an ineffective one, against the treatment that been accorded to Leslie Martinez, Falconieri, Alvarado-Salcido and Holzer. He zeroed in on the intentional misfeasance and passive negligence of the city and department in dealing with improprieties on the part of members of the department.
“[A]llegations of sexual misconduct are treated in a laissez-faire manner and complete lack of diligence within the city,” the claim stated. “[H]igh-ranking members of the city government were aware of the allegations for months and did nothing to investigate or protect other employees.”
He asserted that in the waning months and weeks of 2017 and the start of 2018, as Mark Garcia was preparing to move into retirement, he had opposed the promotion of Reiss to what became the department’s second deputy chief position, and had instead pushed to have then-City Manager Nabar Martinez and Catren elevate Tolber, but had been overruled.
According to the claim, Travis Martinez “suffered retaliation for being a whistleblower against the city officials who agreed to enter into an unlawful conspiracy with each other to deny Martinez the full benefits of his employment with the city and the discrimination taken against him based upon his exercise of protected conduct,” the claim states.
He alone among the department’s executive/command echelon had reacted appropriately in the face of the sexual improprieties that were ongoing, according to the claim, which held that “high-ranking members of the government were aware of the allegations for months and did nothing to investigate or protect other employees.”
Despite his advocacy on behalf of Tolber in 2017 and 2018 and belief that she was then qualified to move into a deputy chief position, the department’s third-highest-ranking post, Travis Martinez maintained he was a “superior candidate” to Tolber for the position of interim chief and police chief in 2023, given his track record of success while overseeing the department’s crime reduction programs and implementing a community policing strategy.
Despite Travis Martinez’s seeming acknowledgment that the Redlands Police Department was a male-dominated enclave rife with the abuse and prejudicial treatment of women, in his claim he suggested he was himself the victim of reverse gender-based discrimination and retaliation. The claim states that “the city decided to choose a less qualified person like Tolber for the position because the city has had problems with sexual harassment allegations and lawsuits and that hiring a female chief shows they are resolving issues in the Department.”
The city suspended its past practice of giving someone of his caliber the opportunity to apply, interview or otherwise compete for the police chief’s slot, Travis Martinez maintained in his claim, which states Martinez “was not given the opportunity by the city manager to become the interim chief of police simply because the city manager retaliated against him for speaking out and performing his job duties and not covering up sexual misconduct and his reporting to the FBI,” the claim states.
In April of this year, after some back and forth between attorneys representing the city and Moussatche and Wagner, representing Travis Martinez, it was agreed that Martinez would retire within 10 days and receive $871,956, in addition to his accrued vacation and sick leave and other accruals including educational and communication device allowances and would be permitted to review his personal file. Upon retirement, he was to be eligible to begin drawing his $190,519.60 annual pension.
Mayor Mario Saucedo, Council Member Eddie Tejeda and Council Member Denise Davis voted to accept the settlement, with councilmen Marc Shaw and Paul Barich opposed.
The settlement of Alvarado-Salcido’s lawsuit this week together with the settlement of the Leslie Martinez/Falconieri suit and the Travis Martinez claim brings to $3,771,956 the amount of money paid out by the city so far with regard to the lawsuits and claims growing out of the internal police department sex scandal revolving, in good measure, around former Deputy Police Chief Mike Reiss. Suits touching on the same issues have been brought by Holzer and Leivas have yet to be resolved.
In example after example, the perpetrators are indistinguishable from the casualties.
Former Police Chief Jim Bueermann seemed to have gone on to a post retirement career that was equally or more illustrious than when he was police chief. He was a founder and president of the Future Policing Institute and on the advisory boards at Cambridge University’s Institute of Criminology and George Mason University. In addition he was a member of the FBI Academy National Academy Advisory Board and served as the research advisor to the California Police Chiefs Association. During the Barack Obama Administration, he had been appointed by Attorney General Eric Holder to serve on the US Department of Justice’s Science Advisory Board from 2015 until the Board was dissolved at the end of 2018. In addition, he was appointed to the National Academies of Sciences Working Group on Crime Trends and its Panel on Proactive Policing. Much of that has now been eclipsed by the consideration that during his watch as police chief, Reiss was making a steady rise through the department he headed to the rank of sergeant, evincing at that time his proclivity for engaging in personal and physical relationships with the women employed at lower levels in the department.
Mark Garcia bears the distinction of being the first Latino police chief in Redlands history. That is now marred by his promotion of Reiss to a position of commander with the department and preventing, or at least discouraging, his successor from making Reiss deputy police chief.
Similarly, Catren had been highly thought of in Redlands during his time with the department and particularly in his role as chief, in the early stages of which he had acceded to being the president of the San Bernardino County Police Chiefs’ Association and then, up until the time he quickly exited as police chief as the fallout from the Reiss scandal was raining down around him, the president of the California Police Chiefs Association.
The mosaic of the matter is not a pleasing picture but more of less than fully arranged jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces do not match up or complement one another. While the varying narratives of those involved paint a definite picture of Reiss exploiting his position for his own sexual gratification and getting away with doing so, those narratives contradict one another in many or even most of the key details. According to their versions of events, Leslie Martinez, Laurel Falconieri, Julie Alvarado-Salcido Patrick Leivas, Travis Martinez, Geneva Holzer and Rachel Tolber all acted forthrightly – indeed bravely and even nobly – in the face of Reiss’s depredations. All of them, with the exception of Tolber, they maintain, came out of the ordeal the worse for wear. Certainly, Leslie Martinez, Falconieri and Holzer can make a case – and have – that they were mistreated by higher-ups in the department and the department itself, and were forced to live and work by some sort of outdated and genderist code. Still there is an alternative narrative to the ones weaved by Alvarado-Salcido, Leivas, Travis Martinez and Tolber, one in which they all adhered to that questionable code and saw their careers, at least for a time, advance along with the likes of Reiss. In that narrative, one that is probably closer to the truth than the self-serving ones being circulated by most of the participants, it was only when Reiss’s behavior – and Holzer’s action – created a circumstance in which what was well known and accepted within the department was laid out to be scrutinized by the outside world that anyone wanted to make a show of disconnecting from Reiss.
Virtually everyone in the Redlands Police Department knew that Reiss had a proclivity for either engaging in what was tantamount to rape by coercion or enjoying the sexual favors of women willing to trade coitus or fellatio for promotion. While Reiss’s behavior within the department was not universal, neither was it unique. As one department veteran put it, “Mike wasn’t the only one getting his dick sucked.” For years, it was simply accepted that those who had moved up to a certain level in the department could have their way with any women in the department who were willing, and it was recognized that to be willing was one way of getting a raise or a favorable assignment or a promotion, if it were worked right.
According to Alvarado-Salcido’s suit, “Ms. Salcido wanted to keep her job because it was her dream to become a custody officer for the County of San Bernardino. For these reasons, she suffered the advances of Lt. Reiss so she could keep her job with hopes of eventually becoming a police officer.”
Some Redlands residents have expressed the view that Alvarado-Salcido was of the age of majority and of sound mind when she freely made the decision to engage with Reiss in a calculated, even bold, move that was intended to give herself an unfair advantage over her peers in the department, such that it is unseemly and unprinciple to reward her with $1.2 million for having done so. Also expressed was a similar sentiment that the payout will only encourage department employees who are now willingly and maybe even enthusiastically abiding by ethically and legally questionable standards and practices currently in vogue with the department to make a future and public renunciation of what they are doing in an effort to cash in on taxpayer-financed bonanza.
The Sentinel this week asked Carl Baker, the official spokesman for both the City of Redlands and the Redlands Police Department if he could convincingly controvert the salacious suggestion that the Redlands Police Department has devolved into a modern Peyton Place.
The Sentinel asked Baker to refute that the good names and reputations of chiefs Bueermann, Garcia and Catren were damaged by their promotion of Reiss and toleration of the manner in which he used his rank and authority to pressure women employed in the department to gratify his sexual urges as well as the perception that women could promote in Redlands PD less on the strength of their professionalism but rather more readily as a consequence of their sexual accommodation of their male superiors. Along those line, the Sentinel asked Baker to convincingly controvert that some women employed by the department did better than others because of their sexual accommodation of their male superiors.
Similarly, Baker was asked for the city’s response to those who maintain chiefs Bueermann, Garcia and Catren as well as Deputy Chief Stephen Crane were not held accountable for their failure to rein in Reiss and that Reiss was likewise held insufficiently accountable for his action.
The Sentinel asked Baker to address the concern that providing Alvarado-Salcido with $1.2 million for having acceded to Reiss’s sexual demands out of a calculation that doing so would benefit her career sets a dangerous and ill-advised precedent which will encourage similar comportment among women currently employed by the department or who will be employed there in the future.
The Sentinel asked Baker if the city was going to make an effort to recover rom Reiss the $1.15 million, $550,000 and $1.2 million payouts to Officer Falconieri, Detective Martinez and Ms. Alvarado-Salcido by garnishing his pension payments. The Sentinel asked Baker if the department and the city by not holding Reiss accountable were failing to discourage action such as that which he had engaged in by its current and future high-ranking police officers.
The Sentinel asked Baker about the prospects of the city settling the yet-ongoing litigation brought by Holzer and Leivas. The Sentinel asked how the city intends to bring an end to the cascade of lawsuits arising out of the Reiss matter.
The Sentinel asked what realistic measures the city and department are taking to prevent circumstances such as those which made up the substance of the Falconieri, Leslie Martinez, Alvarado-Salcido,Travis Martinez, Holzer Leivas lawsuits from coming about
Baker had not responded by press time.